Hal G.P. Colebatch manages to identify a surprisingly long list of things in common between our current commander-in-chief and the famous captain of the USS Caine.

In President Barack Obama, the United States today has its Captian Queeg on the bridge. He has not committed the “high crimes and misdemeanors” which the Constitution has established as the grounds for impeachment, or at any rate the necessary majority of Congress could not at this moment be convinced that he has. Nonetheless, his administration has produced a record of bungling and bad judgment not even approached by any previous President of modern times and perhaps ever.

As the U.S. Navy regulations had nothing to cover the case of Queeg — what might be called borderline madness — so the U.S. Constitution has nothing to cover the case of Obama — a president with a fixed term of office, who is not mad in the literal clinical sense, but desperately incompetent, and who now appears to be looking to a strange, one-sided alliance with some of America’s most dire enemies.

Like Queeg, Obama functions adequately at a low level of responsibility, and like Queeg he is unable to handle a real crisis. Like Queeg he has never had to face a real enemy in the military sense. Like Queeg, he has very considerable cunning and plausibility in protecting his own ends. Add to this the fact that he is the first president to reveal himself as hating and despising much of the traditional culture of the United States and a wish to see it weakened.

The Queeg-type incidents are mounting up, though they are infinitely larger and more serious: the “beer summit” first showed, like cutting the tow-line, a disturbing oddity of behavior. This was followed by the betrayal of Poland and the Czech Republic over missile defenses, the ludicrous claim that the Benghazi massacres were provoked by a video on YouTube; the vow, made a year ago with all the sincerity of the utterances of a ventriloquist’s dummy, to bring the Benghazi killers to justice; the IRS scandal — a direct affront to the whole spirit of the Republic; his role in the Martin-Zimmerman affair, the destruction of American prestige in Egypt and almost every part of the Middle East and to a degree in Europe, the golf and safaris in the midst of crises… the list goes on and on.

Jonah Goldberg takes a poke at the myth of liberal tolerance.

There is a notion out there that being “socially liberal” means you’re a libertarian at heart, a live-and-let-live sort of person who says “whatever floats your boat” a lot.

Alleged proof for this amusing myth (or pernicious lie; take your pick) comes in the form of liberal support for gay marriage and abortion rights, and opposition to a few things that smack of what some people call “traditional values.”

The evidence disproving this adorable story of live-and-let-live liberalism comes in the form of pretty much everything else liberals say, do, and believe.

Social liberalism is the foremost, predominant, and in many instances sole impulse for zealous regulation in this country, particularly in big cities. I love it when liberals complain about a ridiculous bit of PC nanny-statism coming out of New York, L.A., Chicago, D.C., Seattle, etc. — “What will they do next?”

Uh, sorry to tell you, but you are “they.” Outside of a Law and Order script — or an equally implausible MSNBC diatribe about who ruined Detroit — conservatives have as much influence on big-city liberalism as the Knights of Malta do.

Seriously, who else do people think are behind efforts to ban big sodas or sue hairdressers for charging women more than men? Who harasses little kids for making toy guns out of sticks, Pop Tarts, or their own fingers? Who wants to regulate the air you breathe, the food you eat, and the beverages you drink? Who wants to control your thermostat? Take your guns? Your cigarettes? Heck, your candy cigarettes? Who’s in favor of speech codes on campuses and “hate crime” laws everywhere? Who’s in favor of free speech when it comes to taxpayer-subsidized “art” and pornography (so long as you use a condom, if liberals get their way) but then bang their spoons on their high chairs for strict regulations when it comes to political speech? Who loves meddling, finger-wagging billionaires like Michael Bloomberg when they use state power and taxpayer money to herd, bully, and nudge people but thinks billionaires like the Koch brothers who want to shrink government are the root of all tyranny?

At the national level, who bypassed Congress to empower the EPA to regulate the atmosphere? Oh, and who pushed Obamacare on a country that didn’t want it? Who defends bending the entire country — including religious institutions — into a national health-care scheme dedicated to the proposition of live and let live so long as you live the way the Department of Health and Human Services says you should?

Did legislative and bureaucratic gremlins sneak into government buildings at night and pass all of these rules and regulations while the social-liberal free-thinkers were off not judging people and refusing to harsh anybody’s mellow?

Sure, today’s liberalism does carry within it some genetic lineage to the classical liberalism — i.e., libertarianism — of J. S. Mill and John Locke. But genetic ties are overrated. After all, humans share half of our genes with bananas.

Read the whole thing.

Dan Greenfield remembers the fallen towers and identifies the basis of the Muslim rage which toppled them.

Bin Laden is dead, but the Muslim Oilsphere is full of other wealthy sons warring against the West. His backers are alive and the drone attacks that kill Al Qaeda leaders don’t touch their money men in the Oilsphere. The clerics who teach young Muslim men about the glories of martyrdom can rest easy. They can even open up a mosque at Ground Zero.

This conflict of ideologies and collision of cultures is nothing less than the perpetuation of the great Islamic crusade against the Other. And where better to wage that war than in the places where others meet others every day? What better target than a World Trade Center for a violent ideology built on merchants turned robbers and robbers turned merchants?

In a city where everyone is different, it can be difficult for some to understand that the attackers were motivated by those differences. Their war against us is an attack on people who are fundamentally and incomprehensibly different than they are.

Islam is xenophobia written into unholy writ, a long chain of conquest, subjugation and cultural destruction by desert nomads who know how to drive a sharp bargain, but despite their claims of golden ages and scientific discoveries, have never been anything more than the jackals sniffing around the ruins of greater civilizations.

It is as natural for them to attack us as it is for us to wonder why we were attacked.

Americans hold the peculiar belief that life need not be a zero sum game. That we can learn from other people without turning them into our subjects. That we can make more of something instead of stealing from a finite amount that someone else has and then destroying them so that they can never get it back.

That is the great creative power of American Exceptionalism. It is a transcendent force that turned a land full of refugees into a world power brimming with technological wonders.

New York, that strange part-Dutch, part-English, part-Everything-else city, runs on the creativity of the impossible. Starving artists, aspiring actors, failed musicians, flailing poets, real estate mavens without a dime and brokers trading thin air gamble on the impossible. New York always seems on the verge of total anarchy and destruction and yet keeps going on in that strange half-mad creativity.

For Islam, the game is zero sum. If American civilization thrives, then their civilization is shadowed. If people are happy here, then they cannot be happy. If there are two towers in New York, that detracts from the glory of Islamic civilization. Islam is the bitter beggar forever looking to steal what it cannot have, worrying over the imaginary history of its own greatness and cursing the upstarts in the streets of a foreign city for taking the glory was rightfully theirs.

The American who shares his good fortune with the rest of the world cannot understand that there are some people who would rather steal than accept a gift, who would rather destroy than build and who would rather drown the world in darkness than accept someone else’s light.

Read the whole thing.

Stephanie Cutter

I haven’t seen it, but apparently CNN has revived its public affairs debate program Crossfire. The new version features Newt Gingrich and (from the left) former Obama Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter.

Patrick Howley supposedly reviewed the new Crossfire at the Daily Caller, but his review consisted of a really spectacular anti-Cutter rant.

To watch this latest incarnation of Crossfire is to confront, head-on, the defining unspoken reality of human existence: bad people like Stephanie Cutter can climb, in defiance of taste and public demand, to a position of success.

A loathsome creature like Stephanie Cutter, the roots jutting out from her blonde dye job as black as the recesses of her soul, can push her way onto national television to sit next to a former Speaker of the House and two sitting U.S. senators. A charmless, dead-eyed, tacky sociopath with no sense of ethics, an empty shell spewing her flat-throated bile without the slightest trace of self-awareness, can beat all of us to the front of the Darwinian line.

A figure of hatred and dishonesty, a person devoid of any pleasantness or redeeming human value, a treadmill-stomping, Starbucks-chugging monument to modern self-absorption, someone incapable of appreciating good art, fine food, or the love or kidness of her fellow man, can shove and kick and lie her way ahead of the rest of us in this misbegotten society. This unmitigated monster can appear before us, talentless, grating, fraudulently tanned, thrusting in our faces the career trophies she earned simply because we didn’t care enough to stop her from getting them.

Who is responsible for this speed-talking tragedy? Who, among us, will stand in the public square and admit “I helped cause Stephanie Cutter.” Will anyone? Should we all?

Stephanie Cutter is feminism mutated into grotesque cartoon. She is the 90-IQ suburbanite Student Council vice president smugly doodling her gel pens in the front row of the class, mixed with the ranting fever dreams of the Smith College lecture halls, doused with half a dash of unearned metropolitan haughtiness and marinated in the despicable shouting matches of post-Carville politicking. She is Carrie Bradshaw without the literacy, Chelsea Handler without the punch lines, Kirsten Powers without the prettiness, gorging her face with the spoils of ill-gotten first-world privilege. How did we allow this American with a Social Security number to power-walk through the halls of our society for 44 years (yes, Stephanie, forty-four) without recognizing the warning signs?

Read the whole thing.

I must confess that I actually didn’t know who Stephanie Cutter was, and had to look her up.

Can she possibly be this bad? I suppose I’ll have to look for Crossfire to find out.

Former Colorado State Senate President John Morse (D – Colorado Springs)

Colorado democrats took advantage of the emotional atmosphere occurring in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut shootings to ram through a controversial gun bill requiring background checks for any firearm transfer and limiting the capacity of most magazines to 15 rounds.

The response from residents of the outdoor-loving state was furious. 54 out of 64 Colorado county sheriffs even brought suit to overturn the law, contending that its provisions were too vague and that innocent citizens could inadvertently violate the law by owning magazines readily convertible to larger capacities.

Angry sportsmen and gun owners responded by petitioning for recall elections in the cases of several of the most prominent senatorial supporters of the bill.

Yesterday’s election produced the first successful recalls in Colorado’s history of any elected officials. Colorado Senate President John Morse was ousted and along with him Senator Angela Giron who represented Pueblo.

All this proves once again that gun control in regions outside coastal urban enclaves represents a very effective political third rail for progressive democrats.

Washington Times story

Denver Post story

Former Colorado State Senator Angela Giron (D – Pueblo)

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Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Captain Rescorla in action at Ia Drang, Republic of Vietnam, 15 November 1965.
photograph: Peter Arnett/AP.

Born in Hayle, Cornwall, May 27, 1939, to a working-class family, Rescorla joined the British Army in 1957, serving three years in Cyprus. Still eager for adventure, after army service, Rescorla enlisted in the Northern Rhodesia Police.

Ultimately finding few prospects for advancement in Britain or her few remaining colonies, Rescorla moved to the United States, and joined the US Army in 1963. After graduating from Officers’ Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1964, he was assigned as a platoon leader to Bravo Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, Third Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). Rescorla’s serious approach to training and his commitment to excellence led to his men to apply to him the nickname “Hard Corps.”

The 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry was sent to Vietnam in 1965, where it soon engaged in the first major battle between American forces and the North Vietnamese Army at Ia Drang.

The photograph above was used on the cover of Colonel Harold Moore’s 1992 memoir We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, made into a film starring Mel Gibson in 2002. Rescorla was omitted from the cast of characters in the film, which nonetheless made prominent use of his actual exploits, including the capture of the French bugle and the elimination of a North Vietnamese machine gun using a grenade.

For his actions in Vietnam, Rescorla was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star (twice), the Purple Heart, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. After Vietnam, he continued to serve in the Army Reserve, rising to the rank of Colonel by the time of his retirement in 1990.

Rick Rescorla became a US citizen in 1967. He subsequently earned bachelor’s, master’s, and law degrees from the University of Oklahoma, and proceeded to teach criminal law at the University of South Carolina from 1972-1976, before he moved to Chicago to become Director of Security for Continental Illinois Bank and Trust.

In 1985, Rescorla moved to New York to become Director of Security for Dean Witter, supervising a staff of 200 protecting 40 floors in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. (Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter merged in 1997.) Rescorla produced a report addressed to New York’s Port Authority identifying the vulnerability of the Tower’s central load-bearing columns to attacks from the complex’s insecure underground levels, used for parking and deliveries. It was ignored.

On February 26, 1993, Islamic terrorists detonated a car bomb in the underground garage located below the North Tower. Six people were killed, and over a thousand injured. Rescorla took personal charge of the evacuation, and got everyone out of the building. After a final sweep to make certain that no one was left behind, Rick Rescorla was the last to step outside.

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Directing the evacuation on September 11th.
Security Guards Jorge Velasquez and Godwin Forde are on the right.
photograph: Eileen Mayer Hillock.

Rescorla was 62 years old, and suffering from prostate cancer on September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, he successfully evacuated all but 6 of Morgan Stanley’s 2800 employees. (Four of the six lost included Rescorla himself and three members of his own security staff, including both the two security guards who appear in the above photo and Vice President of Corporate Security Wesley Mercer, Rescorla’s deputy.) Rescorla travelled personally, bullhorn in hand, as low as the 10th floor and as high as the 78th floor, encouraging people to stay calm and make their way down the stairs in an orderly fashion. He is reported by many witnesses to have sung “God Bless America,” “Men of Harlech, ” and favorites from Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. “Today is a day to be proud to be an American,” he told evacuees.

A substantial portion of the South Tower’s workforce had already gotten out, thanks to Rescorla’s efforts, by the time the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, struck the South Tower at 9:02:59 AM. Just under an hour later, as the stream of evacuees came to an end, Rescorla called his best friend Daniel Hill on his cell phone, and told him that he was going to make a final sweep. Then the South Tower collapsed.

Rescorla had observed a few months earlier to Hill, “Men like us shouldn’t go out like this.” (Referring to his cancer.) “We’re supposed to die in some desperate battle performing great deeds.” And he did.

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His hometown of Hayle in Cornwall has erected a memorial.

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2,996 was a project put together by blogger Dale Roe to honor each victim of the September 11, 2001 attacks. 3,061 blogs committed to posting tributes to each victim. Never Yet Melted’s tribute was to Rick Rescorla, and is republished annually.

According to Spiegel, her customers unaccountably became dissatisfied. (Clearly, she needed to whip them harder.)

Several sadomasochists eagerly responded to an advert posted by an Austrian woman farmer seeking clients. But they didn’t get the punishment they had hoped for. Instead, they found themselves doing farm labor in fetish gear, while paying for the privilege.

To sadomasochists keen on fresh air and the country life, it must have seemed like a dream come true. A 35-year-old woman advertizing herself as a dominatrix promised strict discipline to paying clients on her farm in the northeast of Austria.

Some 15 men responded to the advert posted in the Internet, and two or three took up the offer. “They didn’t get what they bargained for,” a spokesman for the Lower Austria police told SPIEGEL ONLINE, confirming reports in the Austrian media in recent days.

Instead of savoring the sweet pleasure of pain, the men found themselves consigned to farm labor such as chopping wood in the nude and mowing the lawn while wearing black fetish masks on the farm near the town of St Pölten. In effect, they were paying for the privilege of doing farm work.

“They had these clothes one wears in such circles, leather and plastic clothes and masks,” said the spokesman.

It is unclear how much they paid their mistress. After a week, they realized they had been duped and downed tools.

Via This Isn’t Happiness.